Gregory Hood
Waking Up from the American Dream
San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2016

A friend of mine and fellow traveler of ours can trace his ancestry in America all the way back to the colonial period. His ancestors’ bones are interred in a old neighborhood in one of our oldest cities. Undoubtedly, they were laid to rest by a community that was very much like themselves, a European one. But were you to visit that area today, it would be unclear what country you were in—that is, until you realize the ethnic composition of the area could only be possible (until very recently) in just one country, the United States of America. Today, his ancestors are buried beneath a sweltering mass of non-white colonists from the global south, who have come there to acquire marginal economic improvements in their standard of living at the invitation and support of the government. Should affairs in this country proceed business as usual, we and our descendants will meet the same fate, being buried in a land which is neither for our posterity nor mourning us. And this was all made possible by the founding “ideas” of this country.

This is the kind of punch Gregory Hood lands in Waking Up From the American Dream, his first book, which Counter-Currents published in May 2016. Waking Up is a collection of essays with one overarching and crucial theme, critique of the American experiment from an identitarian or nationalist perspective. Hood’s America is one that we are all familiar with—an America of materialism, junk culture, social and familial disintegration, and White demographic displacement—but what he identifies as the root cause of all this rot is sure to be a bitter pill for conservatives and constitutionalists.

Ideas can structure a government, but they do not make a nation. Hood argues persuasively that America’s reliance on ideas and not identity to define itself is what led to our decline. One idea in particular standards at the forefront, “All men are created equal.” It’s an idea that many an observer, including Hood, have noted the Founding Fathers could have only believed in cynically. They owned slaves. They were “racists” and “white supremacists,” as anyone with a college education could tell you. They believed in an aristocratic republic where only a minority of the population was allowed to vote, on the basis of their sex, race, property, and in some states, religion. A citizen in ancient Athens had more access to the franchise than one in the early republic. But despite these founding contradictions, the idea of equality and of America as a land of equality has been dutifully executed and brought to its logical conclusion in the current year, which is one of Hood’s many crucial insights.

Once you bundle a set of ideas into an ideology, there is a certain direction it must follow. It becomes a self-fulfilling project, a prophecy, a living document. This is precisely the problem Hood identifies with the civic ideology widely believed in by conservatives. A society which holds equality to be its central paradigm is not going to allow inequalities or the people who notice them to persist unmolested. It will have to do something about them. And so it has. All of the faults we find in our contemporary “America,” or a very great deal of them, are products of this 200-years-and-counting process of implementing and perfecting the claims made in our founding documents, whether by the government itself, or by those who take stock in American mythology. The Dept. of Housing and Urban Development that puts non-whites into vanilla suburbs at your expense and the Army your grandfathers proudly served in are part of the same monster.

In the first third of Waking Up, the case for our need to separate ourselves as a people from the legal abstraction of the United States comes into focus. Hood explains how the historical American nation—that is to say Europeans—thrived and accomplished great things on this soil not because of our yellowed parchment or magic dirt but in spite of them. Waking up does not mean we have no usable past, it means a reinterpretation of that past without the lens of classical liberalism. Indeed, Hoods notes that the Constitution was expressly written for “ourselves and our posterity,” as in the Preamble, but this implied national identity has proven insufficient. We can no longer afford to take our possession of this country, any country, for granted. It has to be staked and claimed.

The latter parts of Hood’s book tackle the issues of establishment conservative impotence and the pseudo-identity politics that Republicans have run with over the last few decades. We are shown a Beltway right that is more interested in social status than getting its hands dirty, and hucksters and hacks who sell White conservatives god and liberty rather than a homeland. Hood says we need to overcome these, and he is right. The “Beltway Rambos,” as he calls them in one essay, have had ample opportunities to defend their religious beliefs and property rights, but all they have done is lose. They are little more than controlled opposition in the anti-white System that Hood argues has been screwing us over for a long time.

Waking Up is the kind of book you should read in public—that cover could be about anything. It’s the kind of book you should pass on to your conservative acquaintances who don’t hate themselves. It’s part of a growing corpus of accessible, succinct, and compelling nationalist literature that equips our people with the mindset and paradigms they need to assert themselves. It is a message they need to hear. Every year, no, every day we let pass without working to build resistance to this penal colony we call a country will only make things harder for us.

On June 1, 2016, the Massachusetts House of Representatives voted 116-36 Wednesday to legally abolish the category of biological sex in favor of “gender identity.” The co-sponsor of the Gender Identity Public Accommodations Bill (H.4343), Rep. Byron Rushing, had this to say: “We are doing the work the founders of our nation intended for us to do. This is a great day for us and we should be very proud.”

Isn’t it time you stopped hitting the snooze button?

The main issues in American politics are mass immigration, demographic change, and the new Culture War against implicit symbols of white identity. A celebrity businessman is now the leading GOP candidate for president only because of his banal truism that illegals from Mexico commit crimes. The overwhelmingly white base of the Republican Party is coping with the brutal reality that European-Americans will be a minority in the country they created. Even the Left is gripped in internecine warfare as an older generation of white progressives grapple with a multicultural monster of its own creation, as minority activists would rather agitate about “white privilege” than suffer through boring speeches about jobs or infrastructure.

The racial question is at the center of American politics and culture. Every new controversy or scandal simply reveals a new facet of the issue racially conscious whites have been debating for decades.

At a time when the Republican Party ostensibly controls Congress, President Obama is unilaterally enacting racially charged policies on immigration, housing, and law enforcement that will have incalculable consequences for ordinary Americans–and there has been no real resistance from the majority party. The only notable thing the Republican-controlled legislature has done is pass a secret trade agreement that has the effect of enabling more immigration–“the worst bill Congress has ever passed,” in the words of Phyllis Schlafly. On top of all this, Justice John Roberts–appointed by the elder Bush–has cemented the legitimacy of Obamacare and “gay marriage.”

Conservatives should be steamrolling a lame-duck president. Instead, the GOP might as well not exist. Grassroots Republicans who thought they had retaken the government are confused, angry, and powerless. They worked for Republicans in good faith, but get only scorn and contempt. They’ve been deceived, cheated, antd exploited.

In short, they’ve been “cucked,” or cuckolded.

The Dissident Right received one of its periodic media boosts yesterday when Conservatism Inc. functionaries Matt Lewis of the Daily Caller and Erick Erickson of Red State discovered and denounced the insult “cuckservative,” which is being used against the Beltway Right.

These spasms of attention from “conservatives” don’t usually last, but this one is different.

The perfect storm of anti-white aggression by minorities and the media, the abject Republican surrender on virtually every issue, the insurgent candidacy of Donald Trump, and the sheer vacuity of what passes for intellectual debate in the Beltway Right has finally led many Republicans to understand Conservatism Inc. has failed. More than that, Conservatism Inc. has always failed. If every political life ends in failure, to quote Enoch Powell, the American conservative movement is unique in that it began with failure.

As it stands today, after decades of electoral success, the conservative movement has not only done nothing to cut the size of government or preserve traditional values, it has managed to literally endanger the continued existence of the national community. The wholesale dispossession of the ethnic core of the country and the utter political and cultural transformation of American society can’t be defended by any definition of “conservatism,” no matter how expansive.

We can’t even call the Beltway Right self-interested. Even within the pages of its own publications, the conservative movement concedes that leaders such as Ronald Reagan could no leader be elected because of the massive demographic change it has presided over.

Yet this isn’t why they are cuckolds. While the demographic transformation–what the French are now calling “the great replacement”–is important, the fact that “conservatives” dare not lift a finger against it is the least of their sins. They’re cucks because they take pride in degradation and defeat.

Cuckservatives glory in advocating positions that hurt their own supporters and humiliate themselves. They act thrilled and proud when they throw one of their own to the wolves. Like Rich Lowry, they might even thank the people who alert them to the dissidents in their midst. They make self-evidently foolish arguments that ideologically disarm their own constituents and reward their foes. They completely accept the moral standards of people who despise them.

“Immigration isn’t a winning issue, let’s talk about tax cuts for corporations with rainbow avatars instead.” –#cuckservative

— Nathanael Strickland (@faith_heritage) July 24, 2015

They are like a man who tries to appeal to a woman through acts of submission; they inspire not desire but disgust. Each new conservative surrender inspires only further contempt in the hearts of leftists, which of course encourages conservatives to capitulate even more eagerly the next time. And since the conservative base remains overwhelmingly white–this proves it is “racist”–there will always be a next time. There’s also the variety of cuckold who gets a thrill from watching another man mount his wife. Such a creature possesses the illusion of control. He can tell himself that he is directing this obscenity and thus remains, in some way, the dominant figure. American conservatism is perhaps best summarized as maintaining a posture of command even as the reality of control is lost. Thus conservatives cheering on the demographic transformation of the country tell themselves they remain leaders in the new America. The cuck in the corner begging to be degraded is still technically the “man of the house,” for all the good it does him. We see the premises of cuckservatism at work in the posts by Mr. Lewis and Mr. Erickson. Mr. Erickson says “cuckservative” is “a slur against Christian voters coined by white-supremacists.” Yet one of the charges against cuckservatives is they have utterly failed to maintain Christian morality in public life. What Pat Buchanan used to call “God’s Country” is a nation where the greatest hero in public life is a 65-year-old man in drag.

So the mainstream is taking notice of the term #cuckservative. And their best defense? “That’s racist!” — Ian (@Ian2813) July 23, 2015

However, the key to understanding this position can be found in an earlier controversy, when both Mr. Lewis and Mr. Erickson disagreed with Ann Coulter for suggesting American Christians could most effectively serve their fellow citizens instead of morally preening by trying to save Africans. Mr. Lewis suggested Miss Coulter’s position was akin to an immigration restrictionist position, which constitutes a “cry of victimhood” andsleads to a politics for the “angry and dispossessed.” An “aspirational” country like ours is one that welcomes more immigration (regardless of the source), sends charity outward, and has a dogmatic belief that the future can get only better.

#cuckservative: A person who wishes for America’s return to 1950s values/strength, without admitting the nation was 90% white then…

— Paul Kersey (@sbpdl) July 23, 2015

Superiority is thus shown by not working in your own interest. As Mr. Lewis replied to Mr. Erickson’s initial tweet about cuckservatism, “They want you to be tribal–to only advocate policies that help your tribe. Otherwise you’re a cuckold.” This is an implicit admission that cuckservatives are consciously not helping their tribe. They seem to think it would be immoral and would lower them somehow. Meanwhile, every other tribe on earth aggressively advances its own interests. The original definition of cuckold–a man who raises the offspring of another–comes to mind when we think of conservatives’ apparent glee at the replacement of Americans with ethnocentric Third Worlders. But the moral calculus of men like Mr. Lewis and Mr. Erickson reflects a deeper perversion. Like the man who begs to watch as he is cuckolded, they reframe the reality of inferiority as a kind of weird proof of superiority. Their own degradation is proof of their imagined virtue and make-believe power. The same mental gymnastics take place when it comes to ideology. One of Mr. Lewis’s objections to “racial tribalism” is that it betrays “Dr. King’s vision.” To make such a claim in 2015 reveals either astonishing ignorance or willful deceit. King explicitly supported racial preferences for blacks and pushed policies more extreme than what Mr. Lewis describes as the “left” racial tribalism of “Netroots nation.” Since Matt Lewis grounds his surrender to leftism in his ostensible Christian belief, he might be also be interested to know that “Rev.” King didn’t just regularly commit adultery but denied the divinity of Christ.

Mr. Lewis’s stance is not uncommon. The fanatical insistence by conservatives that “Dr.” King was really a pro-American supporter of “colorblindness”–in defiance of all evidence–shows the coating of protective stupidity necessary for survival within the Beltway Right. More importantly, it shows how conservatives give progressives moral power over them, granting “the sanction of the victim.” Anyone who knows anything about King’s life knows he would think today’s conservatives were racist, just as he despised the conservatives of his own time. Yet by denying this and pretending otherwise, conservatives prove their imagined superiority. Like the cuckold farming out his wife, they create the illusion of control even as they concede all power and dignity.

The #cuckservative buys into all of the Left’s key premises & worships the Left’s heroes, then is genuinely surprised when his side loses. — Trainspotter (@Trainspotter001) July 23, 2015

The real story is how a resistance to all of this has arisen. While the Beltway Right obsesses about non-issues like the Export-Import Bank, the Dissident Right is creating a vocabulary to fight “conservatives” who are more eager than their supposed leftist enemies to destroy racially conscious whites. While cuckservatives claim to adhere to abstract principles, wiser men and women understand that ideology is often the echo of racial, cultural, and ethnic interests. And since cuckservatives no longer bother concealing they care nothing for their own white supporters, frustrated whites are looking for alternatives.

The 21st century will be the Century of Identity, as ethnopolitics in the multicultural West replaces the phony Left/Right divisions of the past. While American conservatism knowingly and consciously subordinates the interests of its supporters to a suicidal “moral” vision, the successful political movements of the future will confidently assert the legitimate interests of its members.

As grassroots conservatives are gradually awakening to the reality that Conservatism Inc. is a scam, Beltway operatives will need to make a choice: They can reclaim their dignity and confront like men the forces they are destroying them, or they can sit in the corner and keep telling themselves they’re in control. They can prepare the new age–or they can continue as cucked bootlickers of men who despise them.